What’s High Five Ben?

Ben will never stop learning how the world works. To extract his knowledge, he has five minutes to compile information on a given topic, then five minutes to explain in this video us what he knows. Finally, he writes five followup sentences after the video. Enjoy.

Ben, what is the pH Scale?

5 follow-up sentences from Ben:

H+ is a hydrogen atom without a paired electron (aka, a proton)—meaning it is positively charged and it wants to pair with an electron.

Water has a pH of 7, so if there were 10 million H2O molecules in a given system, there would be 1 occurrence of [H2O] + [H2O] => [H3O+] + [HO-] at any given moment; another way to say it would be, 10 parts hydronium (H3O+) per million parts water (H2O)

Stomach acid (or gastric acid) has a pH of 1.5-3.5; meaning, an average of 2 parts hydronium for every 1000 water molecules. That is really acidic!

So an easy way to remember what the pH scale is measuring is the “Power of Hydrogen”—or more technically hydronium. The lower the pH number, the more hydrogen in the system, the more acidic.